Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau makes a good point, one that occurred to me but that I had never bothered to formulate or blog on:

Essentially, it boils down to if lawyers' legal opinions - later deemed incorrect - on an issue such as torture are used to absolve the people responsible for carrying out the orders of accontability, then the lawyers should be held accountable.

Despite talking points by a lot of neoconservative talk-show hosts about how liberals are trying to censor legal opinions, the fact of the matter is that by offering an opinion in an official capacity that encourages illegal behavior, the lawyer is more or less guilty of legal malpractice.

It is one thing to express an opinion as a private citizen, or to argue as to what the law should be. But to give legal advice with the express intent of making an act okay that would not be okay without the advice - that's not okay.

Of course, we need to see how deep this thing goes. One or two issues can be chalked up to political differences. But if there are consistent issues where a lawyer has advised the government to break the law, at a certain point accountability needs to be had.

That is all.

I'm of two minds on this.

On the one hand, laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are a violation of free speech. The hypocrisy of Judge Peters in giving asylum for a terrorist but not for people whose only "crime" was writing something, however false and horrible, is blatantly apparent.

On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with Holocaust denial and I also believe that the vast majority of Holocaust denial is not done in good faith. While what the British government is doing to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle is unjust, I am unlikely to shed a tear over them.

Should we have asylumed them? While I am not inclined to say that we should have, they are likely no worse than other people we have asylumed in the past. Perhaps, then, that is the problem; not our unwillingness to asylum people in cases where the issue (free speech for genocide deniers) is politically incorrect, but our willingness to grant asylum when the issue is politically correct.

I would probably be okay with making overall asylum policy much tighter, provided it applied to everyone equally. It may sound selfish, but this is a British problem involving Brits on one side and Brits on the other, and I am not inclined to intervene directly. Definitely I don't feel a sense of owing anything to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle.

Having said that, I would be much more disturbed if the U.S. adopted similar laws here, ironically enough for the old Martin Niemoller reason, that if we let them (i.e. the government) come for the unpopular, even the evil, in an unjust way, eventually they'll come for us as well. But having said that, I am not terribly inclined to try have us try to deal with other countries' problems on this front, unless of course, it involves the other country enforcing unjust laws against U.S. citizens or, to a lesser extent permanent residents.

That is all.

An excellent takedown by Steve Sailer.

In particular, I am annoyed by this statement of Guinier's:

When a city replaces a bad test, as New Haven wanted to do, the employees who did well on it do not lose their right to compete for promotions

No, they did not lose their right to compete, but they lost their right to a promotion that they had earned. Also, if you can only compete as long as the deck is stacked toward a certain income, then you do in some sense lose your right to compete, as you lose whether you pass or fail.

That is all.

I think that this piece can be best summed up as "marriage isn't fulfilling for a self-absorbed, stuck-up jerk."

Ultimately, most modern takes on marriage or family or whatnot always seem to end with the author suggesting that marriage is an outdated institution that needs to be changed to be less permanent, and if children are involved seem to suggest that we reallly would be better off if parents didn't bother to raise their children so much and let the society, daycare, and schools do more of the heavy lifting (although Ms. Loh's doesn't touch as much on the subject of children).

Ultimately, all of these things seem to come out of the convicion of the author that she (or occasionally he) is the most important person in the world and that the overweening purpose of her life is to be entertained and fulfilled. Children, spouses, pets - ultimately nothing else must get in the way of their bliss.

I confess to somewhat have some of the same personality tendencies myself; but then again, that is why I'm still single, because I'm smart enough to realize that until I mature enough to do so, I should not take on the responsibility of a marriage -or, for that matter, a serious relationship.

(And before anyone thinks that I am advocating a "free love" lifestyle, I am also a virgin).

That is all.

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That is all.

An article in Slate about Ron Paul's latest, and (surprisingly successful so far) attack on the Federal Reserve.

It is definitely worth a read.

That is all.

Obama vs. Bernanke, article by Vox Day.

I also find the quote from Bernanke at the 2002 dinner to honor Milton Friedman to be hilarious:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.

He's right, they did do it. But not for the reasons that he thinks (being too tight with monetary expansion), in fact, almost entirely the reverse.

That is all.

But This is bad news for the "audit the Fed" campaign.

However, we must press on to get the bill passed in the House, after which we can worry about the Senate.

That is all.

I recently saw this little tidbit on Alas, a Blog, discussing a black man who was apparently assaulted for no reason by a cop.

It is interesting that in the first full pragraph of Ampersand's commentary on the occurence, he says:

Although the assaulted man — like nearly all of the protesters — was Black, none of the news reports I’ve seen have pointed out that these assaults have a racist and sexist aspect. But although all kinds of people are assaulted by cops, the victims in these stories seem to be disproportionately brown-skinned men (both African-American and Latino).

Note though, that never once does he mention the fact that the officer, Joseph J. Rios III, is Latino himself, something that he should have at least wondered about, given the almost certainly Latino name.

Considering that if this had been a white cop, Ampersand would have been all out talking about the officer's white privilege, etc., I think that it is downright dishonest not to point out that the cop here was, actually, a "person of color," by the usual definition (where "person of color" means any person other than a non-Hispanic white).

Fortunately enough, a letter writer at VDARE points out Rios' ethnicicty.

Why is this important? No, not because it should be used against Latinos who wish to become policemen. It is important because of the tremnendous anti-white (or more specifically, anti-non-Hispanic white) mentality of the "anti-racism" crowd.

That is all.

Sheldon Filger becomes skeptical of Keynesian Krugman's dismissal of inflation.

An excellent article, and an indication that Keynesian has at least a few chinks in its armor.

That is all.